When you use Stack Overflow to solve some of your problems, you begin wanting to use it for everything. We've often said that Stack Overflow isn't a place for everything that programmers want to do and talk about, but we've always wished that we could make it easier for teams of engineers to better support one another on the same site where they give so much to the public interests of programming.

It has always been difficult to accommodate folks that want to collaborate more closely in a manner that prevents them from clashing with what we've built as conventional public Q&A; there are many kinds of questions that simply don't work well in our shared body of knowledge.

Doing surgery with Git to resolve a common problem is generally on-topic as a question on Stack Overflow. Asking how any particular software company uses Git in their workflow isn't the best question to ask on Stack Overflow because it's not really related to a programming problem someone outside of that company would face.

Supporting your coworkers on Stack Overflow has always been a little daunting, to say the least.

What teams keep telling us they need is a place where teammates can support each others' private questions on the same site where they already get help with their public ones. Since the earliest days of the site, devs asked for ways to use SO for questions about code or practices that needed to stay private. And since we've launched SO Enterprise, we've had a ton of inquiries from companies too small for a local install, but who want to pay for a private space on SO.

We're happy to announce that we've come up a way to provide those places, and we're calling them:

Stack Overflow Channels

What we're calling channels can be summed up as:

tl;dr;

Channels are a means for organizations to provide a quiet space for their engineering teams to collaborate pretty much unrestricted and unstructured apart from public Q&A on Stack Overflow through a more private means that we're calling a channel. Channels are for organizations both large and small and do not in any way affect public Q&A.

This allows for a stronger kind of engagement without asking more from our seasoned users, because ownership stays entirely with the owners and administrators of the channels.

If you stop reading now, there are two important and essential things you should know about channels:

They work just like regular Q&A, but their content as well as access to privileges to moderate their content are confined to the folks participating within the channel. What happens in a channel, including any rep or privileges earned, stays in a channel sort of like what happens in Vegas.

Channels in no way affect standard public Q&A, they just have access to the same features and tools. Each channel is free to set its own moderation policy, define what is on-topic, etc. It is entirely up to channel owners and administrators to review and maintain their content.

We eventually plan to charge for some tiers of channels, but we're not yet sure how much that's going to be or when we're going to begin. Rest assured, there will be plenty of notice prior to that happening; our main interest right now is building the platform to be as useful as it can possibly be. One of the things we really love about Channels is that it will better align part of our monetization strategy with Q&A, which we think will help us be able to continue to invest in improvements to our flagship product.

Allowing developers to centralize where they find technical solutions in a single place has been a huge task over the years. We've struggled with ways to attack it before, but channels will bring us a lot closer to making it a reality.

Wait, how are these things going to work?

Think of a channel as a sort of private repository. It has an owner that can approve other users to join, and give some of those users additional privileges to do things.

When you operate within a channel, all of the privileges you earn (including reputation, etc.) remain specific to that channel, where your ability to contribute will grow over time, depending on how the channel is configured.

Folks that belong to channels will be able to search content from a single location, but reputation, privileges and moderation access within a channel won't carry over to public Q&A.

Is this part of Enterprise? Will there be a public version for open source?

No. Enterprise is a full-blown private site that is set up specifically for an organization to use. The two are completely separate products.

Channels are for teams that want to use a single resource, but need a more private and quiet place to do it, and should be useful for teams way too small for Enterprise to be a good solution.

We're not too concerned about fragmentation, because an asker with questions that would serve the public interest is better off asking them there. (Who's going to ask their twelve teammates a question when they can ask the full Stack Overflow community?)

Any plans to offer these for product support, or other public channels?

Mayprobably? Because so many devs have asked for it and the fact that it's the one we think can monetize easily, we're starting with a focus on Private Channels targeting development teams. But assuming that works, we would definitely consider expanding to public channels serving different use cases. (Especially if we think those channels could actually help Q&A, by addressing some needs that the community can help with, but which cause problems when mixed in with "traditional" Q&A.)

However, it's way too early to tell if that's a direction that channels will go, or how a less private scheme might work.

What do you want / need us to do now? How do we get started?

We need to see how product teams both large and small are going to use what we've put together as an initial offering, and gauge how much interest folks have in trying / using Channels as it matures.

Head over here, have a quick read, and tell us about your organization. We'll then be in touch to get any additional information required and get you set up once we're ready to go!

We also invite you to use the answers below to ask any questions that you have about how things are going to work, directions we plan to take or similar questions. This is a big step for us, there's lots of information, and it's impossible to include all of the most exciting details in a single post.

We want to get your input as early as possible, which is why we're

Working on opening channels up for testing now, before we're even quite ready to share an early viable product.

Asking for any suggestions or asks for possible features now - please post them below.

We really want to know how channels can help you and your team get your jobs done and what we can do to make sure it fits the many different types of teams that we envision using it.

We're also quite happy to answer any questions about technical details on how the system works, so please don't be shy about asking.

There's absolutely no reason why a channel would need to stay confined to programming related questions, is there? That sounds interesting in so many ways. Any rough ideas about pricing yet? Is there likely to be a free tier?
– Pekka 웃Jul 11 '17 at 16:42

13

@Pekka웃 We're targeting development teams (for obvious reasons, I hope). But those teams can use the engine for any questions they want in theory - they'll be self-moderated. And we'd be open to other teams who want to use it at some point, too.
– JaydlesJul 11 '17 at 16:45

5

@Pekka웃 it's too early to guess at the right pricing, or even exactly who does and doesn't pay. We'd like to mostly optimize for breadth of adoption first - we want to get this useful to the most devs, so there are tons of companies who want to pay for it. That might well mean a "free forever" tier for some kinds of teams, but we really don't know yet.
– JaydlesJul 11 '17 at 16:48

38

So this is what "Teams" was supposed to be?
– user4639281Jul 11 '17 at 16:59

57

I like this a lot because it could be a solid way to add real value and make good money, yet is unlikely to cause a gigantic rift in the community by stretching the site's mission and soul into new untested directions.
– Pekka 웃Jul 11 '17 at 17:08

48

Since nobody's said it yet: credit where it's due on announcing this in such a straight-forward way, early, and with genuine engagement on all the questions and details. I know there's been a lot of push-back on some features, rightly or wrongly, so this initial discussion looks really promising. :)
– IMSoPJul 11 '17 at 17:28

4

@IMSoP really appreciate you saying that. I'm sure we'll keep hitting some places where not everyone agrees with what get's prioritized, but we really did hear the feedback that it's frustrating at not at least being involved sooner. Plus frankly, it makes us dumber than we need to be. In addition to generally being more open more early, we're working hard on trying to find ways to align monetization more closely with Q&A, which is why we're pretty pumped on where we think this one is headed.)
– JaydlesJul 11 '17 at 17:46

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@Jay also kudos on being up front about the fact that you're doing this for money with some user benefits, instead of trying to pass it off as being wonderful and magnanimous :)
– ArtOfCodeJul 11 '17 at 17:53

8

@ArtOfCode thanks! We'd like to think it's both! Buuuuut... I'm told you can't purchase goods and services with wonder and magnanimity, so we definitely want to stay focused on how to make more money - while staying true to the collaborative, open spirit that made this thing work in the first place. (Side note: I'm more than a little surprised that "magnanimity" turned out to be an actual word.)
– JaydlesJul 11 '17 at 17:57

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44 upvotes and only 1 downvote. A much needed mental health break for some on the team I'm sure :)
– Pekka 웃Jul 11 '17 at 18:50

7

I have a slight worry that this could have a negative impact on Q&A in the fact that it's open to abuse; active high rep users could get together and create a channel just so they don't have to deal with the rubbish posted on SO. It could end up being that a lot of users club together to create a "separate" SO without the need to worry about anything on SO. There's a slight chance queues could be impacted in a negative way. Or am I worrying over nothing here?
– BugsJul 11 '17 at 19:36

Sounds good, but discussing Git workflows you can do also on software engineering.stackexchange. So I kind of fail to see the need really. For small teams (say less than 10,000 participants), there are surely tons of content management systems out there. Why again do people want to use SO for everything?
– TrilarionJul 11 '17 at 21:06

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This seems to be targeted at engineering stuff by being posted on MSO rather than MSE, is there a reason for that? Surely the QA doesn't need to be limited to techie stuff, just like the SO network isn't?
– DavidGJul 12 '17 at 8:12

13

Just want to say this: I believe in this idea WAY more than I ever believed in Documentation and Developer Story.
– BenjolJul 12 '17 at 12:34

39 Answers
39

Make it easy to find solutions to technical problems on a searchable platform where knowledge is always discoverable.

With the built-in search functionality being as broken as it is, we often defer to google to find stuff on SO. How can Channels™ be touted as "searchable" when google can't index that private content? Is the built-in search getting some attention?

@dorukayhan And how exactly would you tell Google that you, performing a search right now, have access to a channel, so they should please also look inside there but ignore it for everybody else? You don’t have control over any of this; either Google indexes it and it’s accessible for everyone, or they don’t.
– pokeJul 11 '17 at 19:00

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@dorukayhan My point is, after Google has indexed all the private stuff, how are you restricting people from finding the stuff on Google they don’t have access to?
– pokeJul 11 '17 at 19:19

6

Apart from the fact that it's all supposed to be private and I doubt those organizations would appreciate google indexing it all anyway.
– canonJul 11 '17 at 19:26

6

@dorukayhan even ignoring the issues poke already mentioned, I think you're drastically underestimating just how easy it is to spoof a user agent string. Google for private search would be out of the question without some bespoke work on both Google and SO's side.
– DaveJul 11 '17 at 19:33

24

We need to overhaul search (the post pipeline specifically) for several reasons around upgrading elastic. We're starting work on that likely this week and getting rid of a lot of old pipeline code around it. This should allow us to do many things with elastic that we couldn't before. As an example, we'd like to display Q&A nested in search results like subsections of a page with highlights (at least test such a layout), but perf of child documents has held this back. Soon, we'll eliminate the technical blockers to exploring it. We have to improve search to make this non-google world work.
– Nick Craver♦Jul 11 '17 at 19:55

20

@canon It's been in the architecture backlog for some time - but we really have to prioritize: HTTPS, jobs, email prefs, SendGrid, SQL Servers, and a thousand other things on our plate...Channels give us a priority to get these things done. Even proving out if Channels is a viable product will help Q&A, the engineers are really excited about getting back to feeding what we're good at and sustaining as a company at the same time. We've got a lot of hope this succeeds for many reasons like this.
– Nick Craver♦Jul 11 '17 at 20:57

6

@NickCraver was full HTTPS support done specifically to facilitate Channels?
– canonJul 11 '17 at 21:02

17

@canon not at all connected. I didn't learn about the plan to create Channels until a few weeks ago when our CTO asked me "how do we make something like this?...and what about 100,000 of something like this? can we do that?" Fun conversation, I love these kinds of problems. I'm just here to try and make everyone's life better if I can. Unfortunately the backlog of things making that happen is forever growing, it's what happens when ideas outpace time. So many things we want to do, if we can solve the money question, we get to prioritize fun stuff more and more. Need more hours in a day.
– Nick Craver♦Jul 11 '17 at 21:09

18

@TravisJ I have no problem being frank about it: I don't think ElasticSearch has held back our search. I think lack of time spent on search has held back our search. Before, the vast majority of people came in from Google and never touched our search. This is a huge priority shuffle in that area and we'll finally be spending some decent time on it as a result, Channels improving Q&A and vice-versa due to ~99% feature overlap is what I'm very excited about.
– Nick Craver♦Jul 11 '17 at 21:18

4

Allowing Google spider access to private channels is very dangerous; there will be an expectation of privacy, so even with just search engine snippets it may be possible to find things like passwords or NDA-covered topics being discussed.
– Ken Y-NJul 12 '17 at 1:12

8

Any type of security we have would be a bit folly if we opened to external systems access, I can for certain say we wouldn't let Google crawl any private Channels.
– Nick Craver♦Jul 12 '17 at 12:54

10

@TylerH I'm drawing attention to the fact that the site-search is so bad that we've had to rely on Google... and that's not an option for this project. The next line is literally, "Is the built-in search getting some attention?" The entirety of my post (sans quote) is three sentences. Two devs (and ~100 users) just validated my concern. Surely, it can't be all that confusing.
– canonJul 13 '17 at 13:45

I'd like to see a robust offering of communication channels (E-Mail, Slack, whatever else kids use these days) for notifications, so a team's use of the product doesn't ebb away because nobody goes check it for new content (and you end up sending inane "Hey I posted this question" E-Mails to get folks to go there).

Please don't just fall back on integrating Channel notifications with global SE notifications and call it a day! If you have to be active on SE to be able to use the product properly, you'd hugely limit the group of potential users. Even in a dev team, not everyone is going to be a SO/SE user.

Notification options should be relatively fine-grained. I know that leads to lots of complexity, but it's essential in a team environment.

1st priority:

Allow users to subscribe to all activity in a question, including comments to posts not by them (by starring?)

Allow opting out of notifications for a specific question completely

Other than that, only notify as SO does now - when someone responds to my question, comments underneath one of my posts, or @s me

Global @ing of other users (regardless if they were active in a post or not)

2nd priority:

Notify on new questions in specific tags

User groups, notify users from group X about questions in tags Y and Z

I not only agree with pretty much every point here, ATM I tend to think these types of granular push notifications are one of the most critical features to make questions only visible to a smaller number of users still get in front of the right people to get answers.
– JaydlesJul 11 '17 at 17:04

39

Based on my experience using the Enterprise setup internally, this is dead-on; I had to build my own notification tool, which is at least plausible for an enterprise-scale setup but fairly absurd for a small team looking to save time.
– Shog9♦Jul 11 '17 at 17:19

11

Yes! Totally agree - we're spending a ton of time thinking about the ways in which we can ensure that the right info gets in front of the right people at the right times. Utilizing the communication channels that people are already using will be one of the most important ways we do that. For example, maybe we can let people ask a question from within Slack? Or respond to an email to answer a question they've been tagged in? There are tons of options, and we're still figuring it out.
– kristinalustigJul 11 '17 at 17:23

Technical bits: Webhooks was one of the first things I added to our list as a nice to have. It's hard to scale to SO size due to sheer volume, but the activity of these Channels in aggregate is unlikely to have that problem. I definitely think we can figure our something very usable here.
– Nick Craver♦Jul 11 '17 at 19:22

@StevenVascellaro in theory a team could integrate the other way; I have a Slack bot that polls SE's RSS feed and dumps it to chat, and it's pretty trivial to set up as a "custom integration". But something that is more active than that would be much better.
– Michael EdenfieldJul 11 '17 at 22:23

"Even in a dev team, not everyone is going to be a SO/SE user" <- I can definitely confirm this. In the company I work for, almost no one has a SO/SE account; and those who do, rarely use it.
– Radu MurzeaJul 24 '17 at 13:43

I'm concerned about accidental posts. What happens when someone thinks they are in a private channel but accidentally posts confidential information to SO? I feel like that may happen more frequently. I think the difference (such as the UI) between SO and your private channel needs to be very apparent.

Branding may help. Seeing your company's/team's logo at the top may remind you where you are.

That's priority #1. We're doing a lot of design work (using a different visual language, clear labeling, etc.) to make sure it's EXTREMELY clear where you're posting things at all times. Good point with the branding, we're exploring that as a solution too.
– kristinalustigJul 11 '17 at 19:07

7

This is a good point. "Oops, wrong window" syndrome is dangerous
– Pekka 웃Jul 11 '17 at 19:14

9

I'm less concerned about accidental posts than about intentional posts: "Who's going to ask a their twelve teammates a question when they can ask the full Stack Overflow community?" A migration feature might be necessary indeed.
– BergiJul 11 '17 at 19:59

1

@KristinaLustig How about changing the branding so that you don't even see "Stack Overflow" at the top or in the HTML <title>?
– TylerHJul 12 '17 at 15:41

An extra confirmation step seems like the most robust approach here, similar to how Amazon makes you double confirm when you want to buy something (unless you're using their 1-click-buy feature).
– Radu MurzeaJul 24 '17 at 13:49

One feature that comes to mind that Channels should probably have right from the start is uploading documents. Any internal knowledge base will likely have the need to store some of those.

More storage space for that could also be one feature of more expensive tiers later.

Although of course this introduces a major headache that you guys just outsourced to imgur... but come to think of it, any images you upload in a private channel context should be private, too, so imgur as a hosting solution for those is probably out anyway!

Thinking the need for this is likely to be inevitable, good idea.
– Tim Post♦Jul 11 '17 at 17:20

36

Uploading documents? Would also require making them searchable, editable etc - where does it end?! I think this is too much of a media disruption from Q&A. Most teams will already have a local wiki and/or file server. Sure things like a seamless search would be nice, but I think SO cannot and should not compete against such solutions. Rather find ways to integrate them, by embedding/linking content. A minimal "document" feature might be built from wiki Q&A or Documentation tech.
– BergiJul 11 '17 at 19:41

3

@Bergi an uploaded document doesn't have to be neither searchable nor editable. Just a plain old link to a PDF or whatever. Given that they'll have to rethink file storage for images anyway (because images uploaded to a channel might contain sensitive info) it doesn't seem like too big a stretch to allow run-off-the-mill typical office documents up to a certain size.
– Pekka 웃Jul 11 '17 at 19:45

2

@Pekka웃 Yes, supporting document uploads is feasible and simple from a technical point of view, but I'm suggesting that it's not useful. Images that can be embedded in posts provide a real value and are intimately related to the channel, but I'm less certain about PDFs. It's just Yet Another Place To Look when you're searching for some info. Maybe it's useful for small teams that have no other storage, but for larger teams it should be enabled only on administration request.
– BergiJul 11 '17 at 19:55

2

This problem has already been solved - Google Docs, dropbox, github, group email, etc. If these channels cannot share simple files through the existing sharing techniques and need to share files of multiple gigs using channels, then that would be even worse to facilitate.
– Travis JJul 11 '17 at 21:11

34

Gotta be honest, the first thing that popped into my head when I read this was Sharepoint "wikis", which ended up being huge steaming piles of Word docs that no one ever found or edited. Doesn't have to end up that way of course, but there are certainly some nasty patterns to avoid when a system gives you "attachment" functionality.
– Shog9♦Jul 11 '17 at 21:16

1

+1 To what @Shog9 said. This will quickly end up being a paperdump for all things pdf / excel / powerpoint and lose the Q&A part if not done very, very well. Suffering from this exact same problem on an internal platform we use.
– Burhan KhalidJul 12 '17 at 5:49

1

If Channels is intended for private companies/teams etc then chances are they already have a centralized location for documents that the relevant users can be granted access to internally - GoogleDrive, DropBox, OneDrive, SharePoint, etc - why reduplicate that effort in SO? Users can simply link to, or include locations for, that stuff in their Q&A without needing to upload it surely?
– TobyJul 12 '17 at 11:45

The team can probably get away with uploading as images to the i.stack.imgur subdomain, like healthcare facilities do for much of their medical documentation. Otherwise, I'd say @TravisJ is on the money--this has been solved already with Dropbox, Google Docs, OneDrive, etc.
– TylerHJul 12 '17 at 15:40

OK, that every member of a potential team has frictionless access to a protected document sharing service elsewhere is an assumption that probably works for engineering teams. Not outside the field, though, I guarantee you.
– Pekka 웃Jul 12 '17 at 15:41

3

It's typically the onus of the IT department to provide protected document sharing for a company at large. Whether that's an intranet or SharePoint or OneDrive, etc. I think there'd have to be a reeeallly elegant solution that no one's ever thought of for it to be worth doing one just for SO Channels.
– TylerHJul 12 '17 at 16:03

2

Dropbox, Google Docs, etc are wonderful, but some companies block access to all file sharing locations to avoid HIPPA violations. Of course, those same companies also block access to imgur as well so some peoples' viewing of SO/SE images is spotty at best.
– FreeManJul 12 '17 at 17:40

1

I upvoted for the imgur portion but I dislike the idea of uploading documents wholesale.
– canonJul 13 '17 at 16:10

Let's say we try the beta for three months, and then decided that – for whatever reason – this isn't for us. Would we be able to easily export all of our data in a readable format so we can put it somewhere else?

I'm not sure what the plans are here, but this seems like a very reasonable ask to me. We need to work on export formats for people who may want to upgrade to very large instances (Enterprise) anyway...so this should be kept in mind - I added it to our board.
– Nick Craver♦Jul 11 '17 at 21:01

@NickCraver On that note, how scalable is SO Channels itself? If we like SO Channels but need an "Enterprise"-sized instance, for thousands or tens of thousands of users, would keeping it hosted be feasible? Or will there be an upper limit to users/db size that you enforce?
– TylerHJul 12 '17 at 16:01

5

That would be my single concern: we build a thorough knowledge base for a few months, and then SO Channels "un-ships", and then, and then what?
– Mathieu GuindonJul 12 '17 at 16:06

@Mat'sMug SO could build an exporter targeting the backup format of some SO clone (I have used OSQA in the past with moderate success, for example). You'd still be stuck hosting it yourself, though.
– Jeffrey BosboomJul 12 '17 at 17:32

We haven't worked through all of this yet so take this with a grain of salt, but we'll potentially err on the side of relaxing privilege requirements and/or let admins for Channels set those things themselves. The reasons we have for gating privileges at certain reputation levels don't quite apply here. With respect to moderation, we'll likely allow the creator/admin of the Channel to add mods.
– kristinalustigJul 11 '17 at 17:40

2

Some of these have been solved on the Enterprise side in ways we can probably emulate (steal). But some will probabaly need different solutions due to the scale.
– JaydlesJul 11 '17 at 17:48

6

@KristinaLustig There's gonna need to be some clear communication about who has jurisdiction. Letting channel admins add channel mods is a good idea, but I think SO mods should still have their diamonds in channels (if they can view them, which they should probably be able to), and should probably keep final jurisdiction (before we hit employee level, anyway). Whatever happens, you're gonna need to be clear to everyone involved about who has what authority.
– ArtOfCodeJul 11 '17 at 17:51

17

@ArtOfCode Interesting points, thanks. I dunno that I personally agree that SO mods should be able to view Channels stuff that is private to a given company, but again, all of this is still TBD as we're building it out. Definitely agree that we're going to have to be crystal clear about who has authority where and how.
– kristinalustigJul 11 '17 at 18:02

10

@ArtOfCode I'm not really sure that all SO mods having access to all channels is really going to work with the plan to monetize them. That seems like a major nonstarter to me.
– enderlandJul 11 '17 at 18:10

20

While a lot's still up in the air, I think it's safe to say that SO Mods won't have access to - or be burdened with any new responsibilities on - Channels. They can only be viewed by those a channel admin ok's, which presumably would usually be limited to fellow employees. Our trust in our moderation team is limitless, but companies are fairly persnickety about who can see their proprietary code and other interactions. :)
– JaydlesJul 11 '17 at 18:23

24

Why would SO mods have access to a Channel? It's supposed to be private to a company, which means that there's no need for policing by anyone outside the company... are you going to get the SO mods to sign dozens (hundreds) of NDAs just so they can have access? I don't see why a non-channel employee mod is necessary
– Catija♦Jul 11 '17 at 18:24

2

I would hope that normal moderators do not have access to channels they are not authorized for, and agree that the state of the channel should/would be dictated by the organization itself. If it is a problem, it is only a private problem, which is how every single organization operates anyway from a communication standpoint.
– Travis JJul 11 '17 at 21:21

2

I would assume that (a) only SO employees would have access, and (b) only in very controlled, specifically agreed-upon ways, similar to how GitHub employees won't look at the contents of your private repos unless to specifically assist you.
– WildcardJul 13 '17 at 22:26

Actually, I'd rather it be more of a "joint venture" thing, and just let edit logs display who's messed it up. We trust in each others ability to help correct mistakes. :)
– Johny SkovdalAug 11 '17 at 19:27

We're also quite happy to answer any questions about technical details on how the system works, so please don't be shy about asking.

Ok!

One of the sticking points for spinning up a whole lot of mini-sites has always been that each logical group of users + posts + tags requires its own database; that's been an immutable part of the architecture since the SE 1.0 days.

From the sound of this ("Folks that belong to channels will be able to search content from a single location"), there's gonna be a bit more integration between channels than there is between sites. Also, unless this whole plan falls flat, there are going to be a lot more of them.

So... how's that gonna work? Thousands of tiny databases indexed together for the benefit of folks searching across multiple channels? Something... else?

Schemas! I've been working on making 10,000 schemas work in a single database. With this we can scale to a million sites without changing our SQL infrastructure. There are concerns with plan cache, etc. as we scale up. If this plan works out, we'd dedicate a SQL cluster to it most likely. Many databases has issues with replication and fundamental SQL Server issues. Redis we've moved to key prefixing (which we have to do with cluster anyway). ElasticSearch is up next, I'm not quite sure how that's going to work just yet. A hundred thousand indexes seems like a really bad idea so far.
– Nick Craver♦Jul 11 '17 at 17:21

@NickCraver don't you have issues with backup and restore time on scaling to that many schemas on same database. I used the same approach to create a multi-tenant system and that was my biggest pain point. Though my database is PostgreSQL.
– Vinit KumarJul 12 '17 at 11:47

10

@VinitKumar I just ran a test locally (not super fast storage - this is an 850 EVO, not our normal PCIe drives) and I can back up my 10,000 schema test database in 7 minutes (7:16) and restore in 8:48. That's with 1.5 million tables and a 77GB database/backup (no compression on this test for worst IO times). If I enable compression that drops to a 7.8GB backup that takes 2:46 to backup (showing it's mostly I/O limited) and 5:56 to restore (again, less I/O). SQL Server handles this pretty on the backup/restore front :)
– Nick Craver♦Jul 12 '17 at 14:15

@NickCraver Looks like SQL Server is the differentiating factor here. I will probably test it out on SQL server myself. Not sure if it runs that well on Mac as well.
– Vinit KumarJul 12 '17 at 17:10

What thoughts have been given to changing the administrator of a channel?

For example, I brought this to my team lead's attention as this is something our small team could use, or even larger groups among our company. (For example, the vb.net team and java team, or broken up by business unit we support.)

However, our team leads and even our managers do change from time to time. Will we be able to easily change administrators, or have more than one admin per channel?

I'm not in a position to use this particular feature but I definitely agree that finding out you can't change permissions/settings is extremely infuriating.
– BSMPJul 11 '17 at 18:15

Yeah, this is a major concern imo. Particularly true because most companies will want some level of administrator access at an organizational/IT level.
– enderlandJul 11 '17 at 18:15

15

Good point here, especially if a manager was let go under less than ideal circumstances. Could be as easy as naming an IT contact early on and allowing them to make changes through our support system, but I'll make sure the folks behind the curtains see this.
– Tim Post♦Jul 11 '17 at 18:30

@TimPost I'll likely have more questions as my team lead and manager have time to check this out, but this one occurred to me as very important; We just recently had a change in team leads, which is what made me think of this.
– KendraJul 11 '17 at 18:59

2

We figured more than 1 administrator per was essential early on, and having multiple-access here would help alleviate a lot of problems. Current schema designs have this in mind.
– Nick Craver♦Jul 11 '17 at 20:00

What will the licensing of content be like? Is it also going to be CC BY-SA? Or is it completely closed content?

How will content licensing be enforced for such private instances? A very common situation that I can see happening all the time is that someone asks a question and someone else copies a solution from SO. That would be a violation of the license (regardless of attribution), and it would be very difficult to track.

On the other hand, if a private channel becomes CC BY-SA, you would essentially require people to open source their proprietary content onto a remote yet private website. I don’t see that work well with any larger company, when they have little to no control over it.

Good point - it almost certainly can't be CC, we'll add this to our list to think about. It hadn't come up yet...really glad meta is getting in on this early and bringing up excellent points and suggestions :)
– Nick Craver♦Jul 11 '17 at 20:04

11

@poke, you're right that it won't be CC-anything, and that it needs to be solved in V1. We actually have started looking at it, but we only tell Nick Craver about the hard problems, so he's not distracted by crap we mortals can handle.
– JaydlesJul 11 '17 at 20:06

Instead of copying, just cite the CC content from SO. The license will probably be some kind of "All rights reserved", copyright stays with the creator.
– TrilarionJul 11 '17 at 21:18

3

AFAIK (IANAL), it wouldn’t be a license violation if a) it’s a non-public Channel from a company and b) neither Stack Exchange nor the company apply a license to the Channel content. Within a company, you can use BY-SA-licensed content without conforming to the license terms until you decide to "share" the content (e.g., publishing it, sending it to people that are not part of the company, etc.).
– unorJul 12 '17 at 12:42

What @unor said. But, why not just link to the SO post, anyway?
– WildcardJul 13 '17 at 22:27

@Wildcard You cannot control what people do in a private space.
– pokeJul 13 '17 at 22:31

Another benefit (concern, depending on perspective), what would prevent a community from say, making a channel and keeping it "invite only" and using it to effectively block or ban all low-quality question askers?

For example, I like looking into good questions but loathe the trolling of SO to find the rare gem.

Could a group on SO simply create a channel and effectively only allow "good" users to ask questions there? And help get around the litany of issues surrounding question quality on SO?

This was my first thought, before I was a quarter of the way through. I wonder what SO, Inc will do long term about public-in-all-but-name "teams" using the free service (Slack has the same problem). Maybe just not allowed in the first place?
– Josh CaswellJul 11 '17 at 19:53

So kind of with a gold badge in XX in the free, public channel (aka SO), you may gain access to the private "gold in XX member club"-channel?
– TrilarionJul 11 '17 at 21:15

1

This seems like a problem we already have, just with other venues outside of SO. If some rooms could be read-only until you're invited, like SO chat works right now with a public transcript, that knowledge won't be lost but the high bar (whether real or imagined) can be kept.
– ssubeJul 12 '17 at 3:07

3

Is the effort required to filter in high-quality question askers any smaller than the effort (currently) required to filter out low-quality questions?
– BenjolJul 12 '17 at 7:37

feature-request: the ability for channels to make individual questions publicly visible (i.e without channel access)

Channels sounds like an awesome place for internal discussion for dev teams, but if you've got a team who develop a public API, they might have a few questions about it or its usage that the wider Internet can make use of.

This works particularly well for teams developing a public API or service that isn't yet big or widely used enough to generate much activity on SO proper, and certainly not big enough to qualify for a tag on SO. The team I work with would be able to make use of this to do some basic usage examples or walkthroughs of our API and other stuff; making these public would eliminate the need to give people access to our channel just to see that question (and risk them seeing more private information). Ideally, such public questions would show up in SO search and be indexed by Google, but that's hardly a dealbreaker.

Ideally channels wouldn't be a backdoor around community moderation in SO proper.
– user3942918Jul 13 '17 at 14:54

I'm not suggesting they should be, @Paul. Anything publicly visible on SO should conform to regular SO moderation standards.
– ArtOfCodeJul 13 '17 at 16:25

1

So how would that work with channel questions showing up in SO search?
– user3942918Jul 13 '17 at 16:27

@PaulCrovella how do you mean? I'm proposing that posts a channel makes public should turn up in search. At that point, they also have to conform to SO moderation standards.
– ArtOfCodeJul 13 '17 at 18:55

1

For the community to moderate them (this is the only way SO moderation standards are enforced) you'd need to reset the scores of the questions and answers to zero (so the channel isn't a de facto vote ring), and open them up to voting, closing, deletion, editing, commenting, and answering. At which point why bother with it being a channel question at all? Just post it on SO.
– user3942918Jul 13 '17 at 19:20

Diamond moderators are exception handlers, community moderation is how the bulk of things are handled. And voting doesn't "kind of" impact it, it has a direct impact (e.g. roomba, highly-voted questions take more delete votes to remove.)
– user3942918Jul 13 '17 at 20:05

1

Diamonds handle more than you think. Either way, we've reached an impasse. I've made the points I came here to make, so I'm done there.
– ArtOfCodeJul 13 '17 at 20:08

The community handles more than you think. I'd still like to know how exactly you propose this feature should work to conform with regular SO moderation standards - just saying the questions "have to" doesn't make it happen.
– user3942918Jul 13 '17 at 20:13

1

There is already a place for publicly visible posts, and that is right here at Stack Overflow main (or a related Exchange). I don't think making a channel QA public would do anything but create problems.
– Travis JJul 13 '17 at 20:33

There's a conflation of two types of moderation in the comments here. One is what I'd call diamond moderation, this is the stuff that would still need to conform to SO standards. We can't have public channels that are rude. However, public (or semi-public) channels would allow questions that don't fit Stack Overflow because of their specificity, opinion-based-ness, or other criteria that are perfectly reasonable for a site of this scale, but would be useful to the users of a product as well as the developers of the product, and would be reasonable on a niche site of a smaller scale.
– user4639281Jul 15 '17 at 6:02

That's actually a nice use case. make a public-to-post, moderated by employees of the company support channel. Maybe charge the company for it. We get rid of lazy support questions, the companies get some of that tried and tested SO QA goodness. Nice idea.
– MagischJul 11 '17 at 17:45

6

The version of this we're starting with is private only, so it won't really work as a product support platform, and we don't currently envision any path for migrations into Channels that are private. If we do expand into public channels, we'd probably want to look at how migration could work, but I'd guess we'd look to the community, and mods in particular for input/suggestions before going too far down that path.
– JaydlesJul 11 '17 at 17:50

3

@Jaydles that might be a good place to think over how migration works. After all Shog, other CMs and beta sites (as well as the site formerly known as programmers.se) have been ranting about how broken it is for years...
– Vogel612Jul 11 '17 at 17:57

2

Related to this would be a way to close question in a channel with a question that was asked on public. So channels do not end up just duplicating public information but rather are able to use it effectively.
– pokeJul 11 '17 at 18:48

I am indeed concerned about the quality of posts on the main site. If users are encouraged to ask "questions that would serve the public interest" on the public site ("Who's going to ask a their twelve teammates a question when they can ask the full Stack Overflow community?"), I can see an influx of questions that would be on the edge of being off-topic - previously being closed as "too localized".
– BergiJul 11 '17 at 20:03

This is a nice idea but if Channels are to be private, how would we know the Channels even exist? On another note, Channels would be for inter-team questions, not public-to-team questions... so I think this one misses the mark.
– TylerHJul 12 '17 at 15:49

I like this idea, but what's the use case? Here's what I think a team of developers might ask about:

"how does foo talk to bar?" (architecture)

this is the role readme's are supposed to fill, and I for one would like to leave the knowledge there

"I saw 2 approaches to fooing the bar in the code; which are we trying to encourage and why?" (current ideals)

potentially useful here, but I've also seen wikis used (e.g. on github / google docs) to fill this role

"When I foo, it bars, but I can't see why. How has this been configured?" (understanding code)

useful, but in a good codebase questions like these are rare anyway

"When I call CompanySecrets.foobar it crashes; do I need to prep it somehow?" (usage questions for private projects)

could be the best use case for this; typically I've seen issue trackers and chat channels used so far, which seem to do the job well enough but not fantastically

"What regex will parse this HTML for me?" (non-sensitive questions)

these should have the relevant code reduced to an MCVE before being posted, which would have the side-effect of anonymising it anyway and making it suitable for SO proper (i.e. anything in this category will just be a duplicate of something already in SO, or be something which should be migrated to SO)

So I'm not seeing any strong "this would solve that problem I'm having" use-case, at least for me. I do see a few risks though:

Ghost towns — occasional questions are asked, but there isn't enough activity to keep people looking, and it eventually gets forgotten about

Interruptions — opposite outcome to the above: a small core of developers with most of the knowledge make it their duty to keep the site alive, but then become a source of easy answers to the rest of the team, causing an influx of questions and the answerers never being able to get any actual work done

Wikification — excessive numbers of self-answered readme-like questions, causing useful Q&A to become lost in the noise when searching (just like the way Google docs business accounts always seem to end up)

Reputation management (specifically related to privileges) — lots of developers aren't active on SO and don't want to be. Within channels there won't be a huge amount of activity (low user count compared to even the smallest of Area 51 sites), so reputation gains will be low enough for noise to be significant. That's not an issue in itself, but when tied to privileges it means you'll end up with lots of people not understanding how the SO software is meant to be used, but having enough privilege to muck it about badly (editing sprees and explosive numbers of tags, anyone?). On a related note, who's going to want to moderate these environments? Giving people the tools is one thing; them being bothered to do the work is another.

Duplicates — as noted in my last point above, this will make the duplication problem worse. You mentioned this as "fragmentation" and decided it would be unlikely, but I disagree: the default action of a developer would become to ask in the private channel, and only move to public if they absolutely had to, because it's easier to post privately (lower quality questions would be tolerated, and no need to anonymise the code)

Security — SO doesn't (to my knowledge) support MFA, etc. If we're putting company secrets on it, that's something I'd like to see (and be able to enforce). Just one account being compromised would result in all the data being visible (compare to github where people can be given access only to relevant repositories for their current work). Also it's pretty much guaranteed that somebody somewhere will use it as a place to store their project's credentials. Because there's always one. Could be a more lucrative target for hackers than SO's been so far.

People leaving — how cleanly can a user be removed from a channel? Would all their posts become Community Wiki? Would the (now non-channel) user still be able to see their old notifications?

I do like the idea, and if it works I could see myself being an active user at least to start with (assuming my company is interested). What I'm wondering is whether the interest would last more than a month or two.

Something I observed on our internal site is that a number of devs used it to record questions that came up during onboarding: just because something is documented doesn't mean a new dev can find it. As with Stack Overflow proper, structuring documentation as Q&A tends to jibe a bit better with how folks search than the usual HOWTO format.
– Shog9♦Jul 11 '17 at 21:00

1

An interesting related concern is that of questions/answers becoming obsolete at a much higher rate. On normal SO, you're asking questions about established languages/frameworks/tech/etc, but internally you're likely asking about things that are work in progress ie changing/evolving rapidly.
– aw04Jul 14 '17 at 18:30

You mention that "Folks that belong to channels will be able to search content from a single location", but I'm not exactly clear what this means. Will searching on SO include results from a channel only if you belong to that channel? Will channels be indexed by search engines?

If they're not indexed, how will they be discovered by users? If a user stumbles into a channel, either through some list of channels or through search, how will they know the difference between that and normal Q&A?

I want users of the framework I maintain to ask questions on the main Q&A tag; it is our official place for programming questions. If someone decides to make a channel for the framework, that's a problem because it is not official and fragments the community. Users who discover the channel may think it seems more official than normal Q&A, if for no other reason than because it has a special "channels" mark.

How will you communicate a channel's purpose and "official-ness"? How will you communicate that normal Q&A is still available (and may be "more official" in some cases)?

Channel content will NOT be findable by non-members, nor will it be indexed in Google (or any other public service). We're still sorting out the details here, but the idea is that a search in the top bar would return results from both the public site, and any channels that the searcher is a member of (which would be clearly marked to indicate they're private, and what channel they're in).
– JaydlesJul 11 '17 at 17:20

8

I don’t believe you’re supposed to have channels per technology/framework. Channels are not supposed to be categorization solutions for SO, but rather limited private mini-SOs (limitation is on people that have access, not the content that is being asked there).
– pokeJul 11 '17 at 18:47

Particularly because you are soliciting people to volunteer during a free period to beta this - if people invest time into this project and setup a community and it turns out to be $100/month, you are very likely going to alienate people who may put in a ton of effort to their communities. Alternatively they could be grandfathered in for free?

I would be hesitant to commit to supporting and investing time into a beta that will ultimately evolve into a product which will cost something that I have no idea. Not even on order of magnitude, will it be $1/month? $10? $100? $1000? No clue.

@bluefeet I know, but it's important to realize that if this gets screwed up, it will do a lot of damage to the success of the project. It likely may even alienate people entirely away from SO itself.
– enderlandJul 11 '17 at 21:11

1

@enderland For people in business (what this seems to be targeted toward), $100/month isn't really a lot of money though. I mean really, a fixed cost of $1200/year? That's what you pay a given employee for a single paycheck or even less.
– TylerHJul 12 '17 at 15:52

2

@TylerH sure. But what if I have a channel for an OSS project? what if it's $1000/month? I can't imagine very many real businesses are going to jump on board a project like this initially (though I'm entirely willing to be proven wrong).
– enderlandJul 12 '17 at 15:54

1

@enderland It's not really productive to run through every possible what-if. Stack Overflow could charge 100,000 a month for it but do we really need to run through that scenario? What Q&A service (what webservice at all) charges $1000 a month? Also, why would an open source software project need a private SO Channel to ask questions? There are plenty of free options that do this kind of thing. IRC, Slack, Github, Discord, etc. SO Channels seems billed as a solution for smallish groups who need robust, private Q&A fora as a hosted service.
– TylerHJul 12 '17 at 16:00

2

@TylerH The point they're making is it'll be a hard sell to promote a product without even a ballpark price range. Why invest time and effort into trying it out, without even knowing if it's even remotely in the budget
– Rob♦Jul 14 '17 at 0:45

Could it work for an OSS dev team?

Say I manage an open-source project (cough), and I'd like to use SO Channels to "channel" contributors' knowledge base in SO-ish Q&A style, is that a use case?

We currently use SE chat for that, and getting new contributors on board involves pulling some bookmarked conversations, for example.

If I had a clone of myself I'd be able to spend some time documenting everything in the repository's wiki, and I could point newcomers there.. but I don't have time for this, and thoroughly documenting internal API's that constantly evolve is literally a waste of time - I feel Q&A would be a much better medium for this, and even if our users did create a rubberduck tag on SO, I think asking under-the-hood questions about Rubberduck's internals wouldn't quite be on-topic on SO (I already have a bit of an issue with there being a rubberduck tag on SO in the first place.. user support works nicely on GitHub IMO), because such questions could only be answered by a rather limited set of users involved with the development of the tool.

Having contributor Q&A on SO Channels seems ideal - it leaves GitHub issues for issues and user support, and makes a dedicated place for contributors to ask something in a format that's much more practical (and searchable?) than SE chat transcripts.

Also, pricing: do I need to start a gofundme to get on board?
– Mathieu GuindonJul 12 '17 at 17:23

2

I have the same use case as you. I don't really want a "private" place as I want anyone to be able to contribute but I need place where no question is off topic for the project.
– GudradainJul 12 '17 at 17:45

2

I just don't understand why it would be necessary or advantageous to anyone to bury this type of documentation/Q&A/information behind closed doors when it concerns an open-source (non-proprietary) piece of software. Yes, there might be a very limited number of people on SO that can answer Rubberduck questions, but you might as well have 'em answering them on SO than have them answering them on Rubberduck.SE.lmgtfy.com.
– Cody Gray♦Jul 12 '17 at 19:42

2

@CodyGray I agree (perhaps the "private" part could be optional?) - except I don't think it would be right for contributors to use the rubberduck tag for questions such as "what are things to consider when implementing an IParseTreeInspection?" or "how do we go about code path analysis?", or "extract method refactoring - should we just disable it when selection contains line labels?" ...IDK.. such questions would have been closed as "too localized" way back when, or "too broad" today.
– Mathieu GuindonJul 12 '17 at 19:59

But I don't know why I would pay for it, unless I was a very small team, but then something like Slack (even the free one) works well enough. So a lot would depend on the pricing model.

Is the goal to provide my team an option for a place ask questions? While I like SO and it's model, is this actually better than a realtime chat? or will a channel include chat functionality too? Honestly I think that SE chat is one of its best features and prefer it over most other chat programs I've used (slack, hipchat, google, etc).

What teams keep telling us they need is a place where teammates can support each others' private questions on the same site where they already get help with their public ones.

Is this really the case? It's the premise the entire proposal is based upon but I'm not as sure that it's actually the case.

We recently launched an internal SO like system. One team has directed people to ask questions there. A very small number are doing that. In fact, I believe I am the only person, every other question/answer combo is a self-answered one from that team after people still ask them in spite of having a great system to do so for multiple months now.

Maybe we're a unique company in this regard, but I don't think so. I suspect that while a lot of people who are familiar with SO would LOVE a system like this, most other people will still prefer chat/direct questions.

Is the idea therefore to have more of a "better than a wiki" place? Or is the actual goal to get teams doing mini-SO QA?

Who's going to ask a their twelve teammates a question when they can ask the full Stack Overflow community?

... nearly everyone I've ever known? Would you rather:

Ask your teammates who are likely to be nice to you even if you ask a stupid/dumb/bad question

Ask the wider internet at a whole (who won't be nice to you)

I see this continuously on both SO as well as in all my personal interactions. People are much more likely to ask for help in a setting they feel more comfortable with and that normally is 1:1 interactions or asking in larger scale settings.

Particularly with reputation tied to channels (and not SO) it will be even more advantageous to ask questions internally.

The way I'm seeing this is as a mix of Q&A, a forum, and a permanent knowledge base that is easy to update. The latter is what things like Slack don't readily provide (AFAIK). Doesn't even necessarily matter whether the place is constantly frequented or not; what matters is that the canonical answer to that one thing that comes up every two years is somewhere well documented where I can find it. Also, the ability to revisit recurring issues/questions/decisions and easily follow past discussion on it (rather than repeat the same discussion every time the issue comes up) could be awesome.
– Pekka 웃Jul 11 '17 at 18:43

2

@Pekka웃 I agree, but the OP and proposal here is focused nearly exclusively on the Q/A from coworkers aspect.
– enderlandJul 11 '17 at 18:44

8

In the chats I've been having with people (researcher here!), I've been hearing that people have the same questions over and over again, and digging through a big complex knowledge base is a lot of work. (And that's not even touching on how much work that is for the one person who knows the answers!) We know that the easiest way of finding out an answer to a question is to ask a colleague, but that's not very sustainable. We're really interested, actually, in figuring out ways we can plug that interaction into an SO Channel so it can be reused and kept up to date.
– kristinalustigJul 11 '17 at 18:58

1

I’m also reluctant with the acceptance of such a thing in my company. We already have loads of different internal communication channels (it’s a mess), and everybody uses them differently. The majority though don’t use any of them, so the only way they interact with another is in person, so they are likely to target their questions directly at coworkers. – In a recent situation, a coworker actually asked a question on SO (first time I saw that happening) and linked to it internally. Discussion about it happened only internally though, nobody actually cared about resolving this on SO.
– pokeJul 11 '17 at 19:05

This answer actually improved my understanding of the problem they are trying to solve. A super-specific knowledge base would indeed by helpful by preventing people to ask the same questions again and again. It would of course only work if your coworkers are not nice and tell you to read the fucking ... knowledge base instead of asking. (Unfortunately) in my company they are all too nice for that. Private offline chat is still the preferred way of communication. But then we don't work remote.
– TrilarionJul 11 '17 at 21:29

Do Channels include the ability to create channel-private chat rooms, either directly or by moving comments to chat? If you're going to call this feature Channels I think most people would expect chat functionality to be available.

There aren't any current plans for this, but it doesn't mean there can't be. It's just an entirely different codebase and problem set, something that would follow later in any case. We'd love to hear your thoughts.
– Nick Craver♦Jul 12 '17 at 10:30

How automatic is the process for creating a channel? How on-topic will these channels have to be in relation to SO? Will channels be shut down if they don't get a certain amount of activity, similar to chat?

For example, can someone create a channel for discussing programming books (or any books)? Can the next person to make a meta post about "a place for all the beginner questions" make a channel instead and see for themselves why it's a bad idea?

IIUC channels are intended to be a paying feature, which means that there is an additional registration step involved there. This additional step would probably entail a verifcation, that the company opening the channel actually exists, ... Long story short it's not going to become the mess that documentation is that easily
– Vogel612Jul 11 '17 at 17:59

How will you prevent abuse? For instance, Stack Overflow/Exchange has always disallowed private communication between users - private chat rooms being limited to moderator creation only. With this, the way I'm reading this, you could theoretically create a Channel, add a user, and have a completely unmoderated... private communication.

This also seems like anyone could just create a channel (as long as it's free) and use it for whatever they want - in ways that it was not intended for, such as a chat room (as I mentioned above). How would you prevent channels being created for no reason?

Even in a paid environment, this would be still an issue. Platforms like Facebook or Twitter are required by law here to respond to abusing comments, even in private communication channels. Just because the audience is limited to a likely very limited set of people, this would still be relevant: Who would be really responsible for moderating the content?
– pokeJul 11 '17 at 18:57

2

@poke it's designed for a company... presumably HR would be the ones to deal with abuse on the sites. If you're going to create a place for your employees to discuss things, I would hope that your employees would treat each other with the respect they use in the workplace. Everything about the application process for this looks like SE is going to be making sure that the right sorts of companies are involved in the testing and usage of these channels.
– Catija♦Jul 11 '17 at 19:03

1

@Catija I cannot see HR actually invest time moderating content on a technical platform with content they do not care themselves about though. Also, getting HR involved would actually require such a channel to be initiated at the very top of a company structure, which seems somewhat infeasible to me.
– pokeJul 11 '17 at 19:08

@poke - In general, anyone can contact HR to bring their concerns to the table. The individual initiating a report does not need to have the authority to write up another employee, all they need to do is simply make light of the problem. I do not see how HR would not have time to review an email with some screenshots and perhaps a several minute conversation. Internal dealings with employees are complex already, and in my opinion there is no deal breaker here. If an employee fails to abide by company policy (which they signed), then that is rather trivial to solve.
– Travis JJul 11 '17 at 21:26

@poke "Abusive comments" is a red herring. The real problem, to which I believe Mithrandir was alluding, was that private free chat spaces will be used for X-rated shenanigans, and if combined with the above proposed file uploads, turns into war3z and pr0n sites. Basically, it's recreating Yahoo Groups, only with upvoting. That may be a fine thing to have, but you then have to police all those nooks and crannies.
– CodeswitcherJul 12 '17 at 2:43

How are they going to be moderated? I don't mean so much the technical details, but the broader concepts.

Are the owners of the channel entirely free to choose a moderation policy? Including an entirely unmoderated Q&A (assuming no illegal content), with insults and who knows what?

in terms of moderation, this introduces many of the issues that were raised whenever private messages were proposed as a feature. Are those still a concern, or do you assume the channels will be able to self-moderate effectively enough?

Do they have to belong to a specific company or organization? Or can they also be just thematically group, e.g. can I create a channel that has a large overlap with the main site? This would have the danger of creating private subsites, just like SO but without the annoying help vampires because they're invite-only, which would likely not be a healthy development.

do the channel owners/mods get access to the moderator tools that are currently secret? If not, how are they supposed to deal with vote fraud apart from simply accepting the inevitable.

"unmoderated Q&A (assuming no illegal content)" It may be difficult to assume that. A completely unmoderated Q&A may be difficult. The minimal moderation responsibility is probably making sure no illegal content is staying. Otherwise very nice point. Per channel moderation guidelines are probably the way to go.
– TrilarionJul 11 '17 at 21:21

How would user accounts be handled for users who do not have any accounts at Stack Exchange as a whole?
Would those accounts be linked to some current exchange, only privately accessible, or perhaps something else?
Would their account then work at Stack Overflow?
Would they need to have a third party email to register, or can they create one solely through Stack Exchange?

At any workplace I've worked at, most users (and management) would expect people to sign-on using their work email, which almost always means integrating with Outlook.
– david25272Jul 12 '17 at 4:01

Current thinking: you need an account (our entire auth system is based on it), it can be a new account. We're unsure about needing one on main Stack Overflow (I'm against requiring this until you want to do something there myself). The account would work on Stack Overflow, presumably we'd create a user there as simply as possible the moment you wanted to do something, hopefully with as little as 1 click. Third-party email? Likely not required per se, but a config option up to the Channel admins (e.g. allow all @mycompany.com emails self-serve, or invite with a link/email directly, etc.).
– Nick Craver♦Jul 12 '17 at 10:29

Let's say the devops team in a company starts a channel, and then you get contacted by someone representing themselves as being the HR department of same company, and they:

• Demand to have authority over the channel reassigned to them, because those employees are doing something they have no right to do in putting proprietary info on somebody else's servers and HR feels the channel needs to be shut down.

• Demand to have authority over the channel reassigned to them, but are actually a competitor. Not that they tell you that.

• Demand to have authority over the channel reassigned to them, because, they allege, that devops team isn't actually a devops team for that company – it's actually a con being run by the competition to lure employees of that company into divulging trade secrets.

Let me put this another way: Stack Exchange works through what is pretty much direct democracy. This is not how companies work. The moment you start trying to provide services to companies that support how they organize internally – how they assign power and authority, how they police boundaries – nothing about how SE presently works will work for them. Right now, you solve, though perhaps you don't realize you are solving, a huge resource allocation problem by having self-organizing, self-maintaining, no-privacy forums. When you start supporting groups that aren't self-organizing and self-mantaining in the same way and have privacy, you will find that you have a much higher support demand placed on the organization.

I mean, have you thought about what happens if (when!) you get subpoenaed? To reveal the contents of a channel in a lawsuit? Or in a criminal proceeding?

We expect to work through such things, honestly these are the same problems every hosted service has. Let's make sure we have something that works at all first, though.
– Nick Craver♦Jul 12 '17 at 10:37

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@Codeswitcher I don't think this will be that much of an issue; it would get resolved pretty quickly when it comes time to pay the bill. If the devops team has their own spending account within the company, there's no problem with devops having their own channel for devops stuff. If devops is the one that got the channel but the company is paying for it out of their general ongoing budget, then they just need to tell accounting not to pay it until devops hands over the keys. SO will shut it down if they don't get paid for it. In other words, just treat it like any other hosting company does.
– TylerHJul 12 '17 at 15:55

@NickCraver that's a really irresponsible answer. First of all, your assertion is flatly false: these most definitely are not problems of every hosted solution. They are specific to your proposed intersection of free + by company. Second of all, while there are companies offering hosted solutions that have those issues, many of those companies – famously all the way up to and including Google – have had horrendous problems with exactly these sorts of things. Or did you think I made up these examples from scratch?
– CodeswitcherJul 13 '17 at 6:14

@NickCraver Thirdly, companies who do have these problems sink serious resources into solving these problems, starting with wages for support staff. SE has never had to sink those resources into these problems before because SE hasn't had these problems before. Certainly not on the scale you're proposing.
– CodeswitcherJul 13 '17 at 6:16

@TylerH you're assuming that we're not talking about free accounts. It's precisely when there's nobody paying a bill that things get so interesting.
– CodeswitcherJul 13 '17 at 6:17

@Codeswitcher I didn't get the impression that this will be available for free.
– TylerHJul 13 '17 at 13:45

My questions are based on my understanding of what I read (correct me if I'm wrong). Based on what I read, it seems like Channels are private questions for only selected/invited members can view.

How secure would the information/questions/answers be?

Is there any options for us, the user/customer/consumers to beef up the security of our channels to ease our paranoia?

Is there going to be an offline version we can implement within our company's server?

Let's say there's an offline type of wiki that is only accessible if you are on company servers, so if there's an leak it's on our security team. Would SO take the blame and provide damage control if channel data gets leaked (I highly doubt it and I don't think SO should be responsible, just wanted an answer rather than a guess)

This feature is very interesting but I'm worry about the security of things. I suppose if data is too sensitive we shouldn't rely on a third party program and of course we shouldn't host production level data in our questions, but what if we have proprietary language which the company would like to keep a secret for: security reasons, competitive reasons, other reasons. Just wanted to know where Channels sit on this matter.

Edit:

Maybe allow us to pay for an offline version as an enterprise version(?) not sure but there are options

Editted "solution" was answered in comments still curious about the rest.

The hosted "Enterprise" version already exists; it's a good choice for large organizations that want / need all information siloed on premises... But it is not a trivial matter to purchase or configure, nor is it integrated into the normal Stack Overflow in any way - so for a small team it's a bit much.
– Shog9♦Jul 11 '17 at 21:02

Ahh right I should have mention about a larger company for enterprise version.
– MooingRawrJul 11 '17 at 21:03

A lot of the security questions have been discussed/answered under other answers to this Meta Q, btw.
– TylerHJul 12 '17 at 15:52

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@TylerH at the time of my posting I haven't seen any real answer towards these questions. Maybe the original post didn't contain the topic of security and it was answer under the comment section, which I briefly skimmed. A Quick Ctrl + F of 'security' yields very little. If you would be so kind to point me to those questions and answers, that would be super useful to me. Thanks.
– MooingRawrJul 12 '17 at 16:25

Just throwing this in to the cauldron: is there any added value to having reputation in the context of a channel? By that I don't mean what do I get for having reputation, but is reputation even interesting or useful in a channel, or should it just be completely removed?

I suspect that in small communities, there won't really be enough reputation in circulation to make it useful. And I'm not sure about the social dynamics of competing for reputation in a context where people know each other and are working together in real life. Also, in terms of gameification and incentives, is reputation really going to motivate people to answer their colleagues' questions, or is it more likely to be their desire to help improve things in general for their company?

(Votes are useful, to float the good answers to the top.)

tl;dr; I would seriously consider jettisoning the whole notion of reputation in channels.

Depending on team size, it's still an indication of expertise. I agree it's more of a indicator than a gamification item, but if some teams still treat it as such, is that a bad thing? There are no current plans to disable reputation, but we're listening! Making it an option isn't nuts, but it's extra code we'd want to have some reasoning for...perhaps something that'll play out in the beta.
– Nick Craver♦Jul 12 '17 at 10:42

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You're totally right that one aspec of rep - unlocking things - may matter less here, but part of its value is also having a feedback loop that conveys your efforts mattered. And ideally has some kind of progressive metric aligned with usefulness, not just activity (which is why some kind of rep-type system should work better than just counting posts, etc.)
– JaydlesJul 12 '17 at 15:34

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Regardless of whether you want to accumulate rep, seeing a green +10 in the top bar that means "someone appreciated something you posted" still feels nice.
– Jeffrey BosboomJul 12 '17 at 17:27

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As long as reputation is isolated to the channel itself, I don't think it is a problem. Voting definitely needs to be included, and I don't see why a record of how those votes play out among users would be problematic in isolation.
– Travis JJul 13 '17 at 20:29

This seems like a great idea to consolidate domain knowledge within an organisation. However the elephant in the room (I'm surprised nobody has brought this up yet, especially with all the noise surrounding GDPR) is the export of intellectual property to a third party organisation. Here are a few points I'd like to see addressed:

I've done a lot of work previously on government projects and there are tight stipulations from the top that no IP (and especially no data) can leave the UK's shores. What assurances could you offer that a channel is exclusively hosted within a geographical location?

I read a previous comment about storing the data under multiple schemas on the same database. I can imagine how trying to justify this to a non-technical decision maker will go when the fact remains that their company IP is held externally on the same database as everybody else. Would a Stack Exchange DBA have full reign to browse any content they wished? Would a Non-Disclosure Agreement have to come into play?

My last point is regarding ownership of the Q&A data; who will legally own the content held within a private channel? And how would that translate across borders? I'd hope that ownership would remain with the subscriber.

I would just fill out the form, worry about how large my team will be later! It's very unlikely that something like "your entire company needs to be on board with this" is ever going to be a requirement. It would be ridiculously unrealistic.
– Pekka 웃Jul 11 '17 at 18:48

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We can help, just let us know you're looking on behalf of a company in the company name field.
– Tim Post♦Jul 11 '17 at 18:49

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I can imagine that some companies wouldn't be comfortable with a group of their employees forming an ad-hoc private community on an unknown (to them) third party and filling it with company-sensitive data. It's not up to the people here; it's up to your specific company. Mention it to your manager.
– DaveJul 11 '17 at 20:59

Do you mean use a channel for questions in Chinese?
– OdedJul 12 '17 at 9:32

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Localization is a special beast. Where a community site is built mostly by the community, localization carries an extra load where we have to build localized things: translations, layout tweaks, search parsers, tokenizers, stemmers, etc. There's a lot of work that happens and we need people to translate bugs and such (we employ a person who speaks every language we have). In short: this isn't the current intent of Channels. I'd think Stack Overflow in Chinese, if there's enough demand, would be a public site like the others, providing open knowledge to all.
– Nick Craver♦Jul 12 '17 at 10:35

@Oded, yes, a Channel for questions in Chinese. The interface can stay in English.
– CœurJul 12 '17 at 10:41

@NickCraver if a Channel is private, why would there be a need to translate bugs and such? I just mean to invite 1.000+ of my Chinese-speaking relations on a private Stack Overflow Channel.
– CœurJul 12 '17 at 10:44

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@Cœur The interface in English for questions in another language just not a use case we want to go down, but if someone wants a Channel for this I'm not sure why we'd be opposed. If we're doing a public site: we'd go big or go home and do a full translation. That's where the bugs and translations come in.
– Nick Craver♦Jul 12 '17 at 10:46

Basically, what would SO Channels have to offer to developers working in a company that already use multiple tools for documenting, discussing, reviewing and committing code, for documenting whatever, for logging issues, for tracking users stories, etc?

None of those are Q&A. This is supposed to be for technical Q&A in a private space with a topicality determined by the owners of the channel. I fail to see how that relates to any of your examples. You're basically saying "Why do we need Stack Overflow when we have github?" or "What's the point of having a car when we have these perfectly good oranges?"
– user4639281Nov 12 '17 at 6:23

@TinyGiant : At my employer's, we use JIRA for logging / tracking issues, Crucible for reviewing them and Hipchat for discussing them, along with various other tools. Not only do these tools serve the same purpose as Channels would serve (= providing a means for organizations to provide a quiet space for their engineering teams to collaborate pretty much unrestricted and unstructured), I'm pretty sure they do so far more efficiently than a simple Q&A could every offer. Hence, I'm struggling to see the added value for companies that are already using such tools.
– John SlegersNov 12 '17 at 13:01

None of those things are Q&A. This is Q&A. That's the difference.
– user4639281Nov 12 '17 at 18:33

To add to my previous comment here. Re: "Hence, I'm struggling to see the added value for companies that are already using such tools.". Stack Overflow has shown that it has value for companies that already use such tools. This is a private version of Stack Overflow where people can ask questions of there team that may contain information which should not be viewable by the public, or just no one in the public will ever care about because the issue is too specific or temporal. All with the ability to search previous questions, which chat apps tend to suck at.
– user4639281Nov 12 '17 at 18:45

@TinyGiant : StackOverflow has proven that it has value for individual developers who are struggling with an issue and who don't have a senior colleague with the right expertise to help them. But even for that, it's often a very unhelpful and cringeworthy platform. If you have colleagues around who are capable of helping you with a programming issue, it's almost always far more efficient to ask a question in a HipChat room, to send them an email or to just walk over to their desk than to ask that question on StackOverflow!
– John SlegersNov 13 '17 at 9:25

@TinyGiant : (continue) And if tracking is important, then you use a tool like JIRA. Not only does it allow you to keep track of every issue ever raised, but it also provides an way to automatically link every commit with one of more issues, allowing you to keep track not only of the issues but of any code submitted in context of those issues. There's no way whatsoever a SO-style Q&A can come even close to such efficient tracking of issues. Either way, I can't think of any added value "Channels" would have for my employer as we use various tools to achieve the same goal far more efficiently!
– John SlegersNov 13 '17 at 9:33

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Im sorry but I completely disagree, and find you outlook on Stack Overflow disturbing. I think this will be extremely useful for my team so I can stop answering the same questions every day.
– user4639281Nov 13 '17 at 17:15

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I would never use Q&A for issue tracking. I would use it for... You know... Questions and answers. That whole knowledge sharing thing. As for efficiency,how efficient is it to answer the same question in hipchat once every few days, instead of solidifying it in Q&A.
– user4639281Nov 13 '17 at 17:35

@TinyGiant : Ever heard of documentation? If you need to answer the same questions every day, that probably means you don't have enough documentation. We use Confluence do document pretty much anything from how to setup our dev environments and which Bing key to use to how our products compare to those of the competition, preventing me and my co-workers from having to answering the same questions every day.
– John SlegersNov 13 '17 at 19:24

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Its clear that you don't want to see a use for this. To the point of trivializing the opinions of all those who do. Im sorry you feel that way but I dont see any point in continuing this discussion. I like the idea and cant wait for it to be stable enough for my team to start building our knowledge base.
– user4639281Nov 13 '17 at 21:26

@TinyGiant : Stop reflecting your own ignorance! I'm not trivializing your opinion. You're the one trivializing my opinion, and you clearly have no idea what I'm talking about. All I'm saying, is that I don't see the added value for teams who already use various tools for efficient collaboration. If you're not one of those teams, great. Maybe "Channels" will be useful for you. Awesome!! I'm happy for you. It's just for teams already using the kind of tools we're using at my employer's that I simply don't see the added value!
– John SlegersNov 13 '17 at 21:34

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You're comparing Q&A to a whole host of things that are not Q&A. Then you say that you cant see what it is competing against. The point is that it isnt competing against any of those things because it is Q&A, and not any ofthose other things, and none of those other things are Q&A. It is different, hence not the same. Your inability to see the difference or application is unfortunate.
– user4639281Nov 13 '17 at 21:41

@TinyGiant : "Channels" is supposed to be "a means for organizations to provide a quiet space for their engineering teams to collaborate pretty much unrestricted and unstructured". So I'm looking at the various tooks that already exist for providing "a quiet space for their engineering teams to collaborate pretty much unrestricted and unstructured" and trying to understand what added value "Channels" is supposed to offer to teams that already use such tools... because I don't see it and I'm sure I'm not the only one asking that same question!
– John SlegersNov 13 '17 at 21:53

@TinyGiant : (continued) All of these tools are all just a means to an end, which is "providing a quiet space for their engineering teams to collaborate ...". You seem to be focusing on the means for some reason, whereas I'm focusing on the ends... which is what really matters. It doesn't matter exactly HOW different tools "providing a quiet space for their engineering teams to collaborate ..." but HOW EFFECTIVE they are in doing so. But since you seem to be focussing on the means... I think the Q&A format is far from the most optimal way to achieve this goal in a corporate setting!
– John SlegersNov 13 '17 at 22:01

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"What teams keep telling us they need is a place where teammates can support each others' private questions" the pupose is private Q&A. Thats it.You're reading far too much into that sentence you're quoting. This is not supposed to solve any problem other than private Q&A. For you to assume that any team that would see value in this must obviously have no idea about any of the other software development tools and team management tools available is frankly insulting.
– user4639281Nov 13 '17 at 22:43

How will hyperlinking be handled? I'd really hate to come to a question or answer on SO, just to see that someone linked to information in their private channel that I cannot view. I assume you would be able to link from a private channel into SO but not vice versa.

Within all of SE, I think you definitely need some sort of message when trying to post private channel URLs saying that you can't do that.

Not sure this is likely to be an issue - any more than someone might link to some other not-publicly-accessible resource right now....
– Pekka 웃Jul 11 '17 at 19:13

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@Pekka웃, possibly. Though I think it goes back to your private channel just simply feeling like SO. If most everything feels the same, posting URLs may feel more natural.
– j.f.Jul 11 '17 at 19:16

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Yeah. I guess preventing that (if just by blacklisting the channels subdomain) is definitely doable
– Pekka 웃Jul 11 '17 at 19:18

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The lack of a share button and the requirement for users to be logged in could deter most users from sharing links to private sites. Then again, I have seen users try to send me links to emails and files on their desktop...
– Steven M. VascellaroJul 11 '17 at 19:21

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We thought about this early and decided to host Channels on lmgtfy just so we don't have to modify the blacklist. Marketing was pissed, but we saved at least 5 minutes of dev time with that domain partnership.
– Nick Craver♦Jul 11 '17 at 20:08